Granting a role without ADMIN OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee
from adding or removing members from the granted role, but this
restriction was easily bypassed by doing SET ROLE first. The security
impact is mostly that a role member can revoke the access of others,
contrary to the wishes of his grantor. Unapproved role member additions
are a lesser concern, since an uncooperative role member could provide
most of his rights to others anyway by creating views or SECURITY
DEFINER functions.

The primary role of PL validator functions is to be called implicitly
during CREATE FUNCTION, but they are also normal SQL functions that a
user can call explicitly. Calling a validator on a function actually
written in some other language was not checked for and could be
exploited for privilege-escalation purposes. The fix involves adding a
call to a privilege-checking function in each validator function.
Non-core procedural languages will also need to make this change to
their own validator functions, if any.

If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent
activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table
than other parts. At least in the case of CREATE INDEX, this can be used
to cause the permissions checks to be performed against a different
table than the index creation, allowing for a privilege escalation
attack.

The MAXDATELEN constant was too small for the longest possible value of
type interval, allowing a buffer overrun in interval_out(). Although the
datetime input functions were more careful about avoiding buffer
overrun, the limit was short enough to cause them to reject some valid
inputs, such as input containing a very long timezone name. The ecpg
library contained these vulnerabilities along with some of its own.

Use strlcpy() and related functions to provide a clear guarantee that
fixed-size buffers are not overrun. Unlike the preceding items, it is
unclear whether these cases really represent live issues, since in most
cases there appear to be previous constraints on the size of the input
string. Nonetheless it seems prudent to silence all Coverity warnings of
this type.

There are relatively few scenarios in which crypt() could return NULL,
but contrib/chkpass would crash if it did. One practical case in which
this could be an issue is if libc is configured to refuse to execute
unapproved hashing algorithms (e.g., FIPS mode).

Since the temporary server started by make check uses trust
authentication, another user on the same machine could connect to it as
database superuser, and then potentially exploit the privileges of the
operating-system user who started the tests. A future release will
probably incorporate changes in the testing procedure to prevent this
risk, but some public discussion is needed first. So for the moment,
just warn people against using make check when there are untrusted users
on the same machine.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in
version 8.4.20-0squeeze1.

For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in
version 9.3.3-1 of the postgresql-9.3 package.